Stewart Stout

I have always been particularly interested in art that is simultaneously rooted in the real world, even as it is transcendent and metaphysical. Using video, installation and the formal language of photography, a medium with an innate ability to both record and distort the material world, my work typically uses the nude figure as the primary subject. The loss of individual identity for the subjects in my work allow the figures to take on more universal representations, while the inherently gendered representation of nude bodies interacting with each other and their environment subtly implicate issues of queerness and identity. These themes act as starting points to address more universal ideas of alienation and solidarity, and to create imagined sites of resistance, refuge and sanctuary.